Roses Are Red (Alex Cross 6)

I carefully wiped down the piano, then I played Bach and Mozart to soothe my soul. It didn’t work.

Chapter 76

THE NEXT MORNING I arrived at Bolling Air Force Base in Anacostia at ten to eight. SAC Cavalierre and three other agents, including James Walsh, got there promptly at eight. The behaviorist from Quantico, Dr. Joanna Rodman, showed up a couple of minutes late. We took off in a Bell helicopter that was shiny black, both official and important looking. We were off hunting the Mastermind. I hoped he wasn’t doing the same thing with us.

We arrived at the downtown MetroHartford headquarters at nine-thirty. As I entered the office building, I had the overwhelming feeling that the place had been consciously designed by the insurance company to inspire trust, even awe. The lobby had enormously high ceilings, glinty glass everywhere, polished black-ice floors, and overscaled modern art screaming from the walls. In contrast to the grand public space, the offices inside looked as if they had been designed by either the junior architect of the firm or its resident hack. Warrens of half-walled cubicles filled large, airless rooms on every floor. There was lots of “prairie-dogging” out of the cubes, plenty of fodder for “Dilbert” satire. The FBI had sent agents here before today, but now it was time for the big guns to go to work.

I saw twenty-eight people that day and I quickly found out that few of the MetroHartford’s employees had any sense of humor. What’s there to laugh about? seemed to be the company motto. It also hit me that there were a very few risk-takers among the people I met. Several of them actually said, “You can never be too careful.”

My very last interview turned out to be the most intriguing. It was with a woman named Hildie Rader. I was bored and distracted, but her opening line perked me right up.

“I think I met one of the kidnappers. He was here in downtown Hartford. I was as close to him as I am to you right now,” she said.

Chapter 77

I TRIED NOT to show too much surprise. “Why didn’t you tell anybody before?” I asked.

“I called in to the hot line MetroHartford set up. I talked to a couple of ding-a-lings. This is the first anyone got back to me.”

“You have my full attention, Hildie,” I told her.

She was a large woman with a pretty, homey smile. She was forty-two years old and had worked as an executive secretary. She was no longer with MetroHartford, which might have been why no one had interviewed her earlier. She had been fired twice by the insurance company. The first time she was let go was during one of the company’s periodic and fairly regular belt-tightenings. Two years later Hildie was rehired, but she had been let go three months ago because of what she described as “bad chemistry” with her boss, the CFO of MetroHartford, Louis Fincher. Fincher’s wife had been one of the tour-bus hostages.

“Tell me about the man you met in Hartford, the one you believe might have been involved with the hostage-taking,” I asked after I’d let her talk.

“Is there any money in this for me?” she asked, eyeballing me suspiciously. “I’m presently unemployed, you know.”

“The company is offering a reward for information that leads to a conviction.”

She shook her head and laughed. “Hah! That sounds like a long, drawn-out affair. Besides, I should trust the word of Metro?”

I couldn’t deny what she’d said. I waited for her to collect her thoughts. I sensed that she was thinking about just how much she wanted to tell me.

“I met him in Tom Quinn’s. That’s a local watering hole on Asylum Street near the Pavilion and the Old State House. We talked, and I liked him okay. He was a little too charming, though, which set off my warning alarms. The charming ones are usually trouble. Married man? Fruitcake?

“Anyway, we talked for a while, and he seemed to enjoy himself, but nothing came of it, if you know what I mean. He left Quinn’s first, actually. Then a couple of nights later, I met him again at Quinn’s. Only now, everything’s changed. See, the bartender is a very good friend of mine. She told me this guy had asked her about me before the night I met him. He knew my name. He knew I had worked for Metro. Out of sheer curiosity, I talked to him the second time.”

“You weren’t afraid of the man?” I asked.

“Not while I was in Tom Quinn’s. They all know me, so I’d get help in a nanosecond if I needed it. I wanted to know what the hell this guy was up to. Then it got pretty clear to me. He wanted to talk about MetroHartford more than about me. He was clever about it, but he definitely wanted to talk about the executives. Who was the most demanding? Who called the shots? Even got into their families. He asked specifically about Mr. Fincher. And Mr. Dooner. Then, just like the other time, he left before I did.”

I nodded as I finished making a few notes. “You never saw him again, never heard from him?”

Hildie Rader shook her head and her eyes narrowed. “I did hear about him, though. I had stayed good friends with Betsy Becton. She’s one of the assistants to Mr. Dooner, the chairman. He calls the shots at MetroHartford.”

I had seen Dooner in action and I agreed with Hildie. He was the boss of bosses at MetroHartford.

“This is interesting,” she said to me. “Betsy had met a fella who looked just like my guy from Quinn’s. Because he was the same guy. He sat down next to her at the coffee bar in the Borders on Main Street. He chatted Betsy up while they sipped expensive caffe mochas, lattes, whatever. He wanted to know about, guess what? The executives at MetroHartford. He was one of the kidnappers, wasn’t he?”

Chapter 78

DURING THE COURSE OF A LON

G DAY, I had learned that nearly seventy thousand people in the Hartford area are employed in the insurance industry. Besides MetroHartford, Aetna, Travelers, MassMutual, Phoenix Home Life, and United Healthcare are all headquartered there. On account of this, we had more help than we needed, and more suspects. The Mastermind might have been associated with any of the insurance companies at some time in the past.

After I finished for the day at the insurance company, I got together to share notes with the others at a nearby Marriott. The breakthrough for day one was Hildie Rader’s story that one of the crew members had probably been in Hartford a week before the hostages were taken.

“Tomorrow morning we interview both women, Rader and Becton. Get a composite drawing made from their description. As soon as we have that, we’ll show it around corporate headquarters. Also, have the composites we made in D.C. sent up here. See if there’s a match,” Betsey said. She smiled then. “Things are heating up. Maybe they aren’t so smart after all.”